A Hitman game that takes itself completely seriously is apparently a Hitman game that doesn’t work properly.
Agent 47, the stony-faced, lab-born hero – well, protagonist – of the Hitman games is rather good at his job, often finding novel – not to mention amusing – ways to dispatch his targets. But far from being an unintentional by-product of game’s murderous missions, IO Interactive says that this dark humor is an integral part of the series.
Obviously the Hitman games aren’t intend to be comedic in the way something like Monkey Island is, but there’s a lot of potential for gallows humor in Agent 47’s rather varied missions. “It’s weird, but it’s also fun in a bizarre way,” said IO’s Martin Amor, technology manager for Hitman Absolution. He said that IO had tried to keep things very serious at the beginning of the Absolution project, but that it just didn’t work without the humorous element. “A Hitman game can be quite serious, right? So that’s why we spice it up with a lot of dark humor to kind of take the edge off it … Because ultimately we are talking about a guy who kills for money.”
Amor does have a point; a Hitman game played completely straight would be a very different experience. Players don’t have to stretch their imaginations too far to get a sense of what it would be like either; the Hitman movie is an excellent example of what a humorless version of the game would be like. It’s probably for the best that that the series doesn’t take itself completely seriously; that could get boring pretty quickly.
Hitman: Absolution comes out for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in 2012.
Source: IGN
